Once known within the district as the “new guy,” the campus will begin its seventh school year Monday with additions that have increased its size by more than 28 percent.

The $18 million project includes a new band hall, field house, two gyms, career and technology classrooms, science classrooms and 500 additional parking spots.

Construction began almost one year ago, after a $21 million bond passed in May 2012. Now, thanks to the project, the high school will be the largest campus in the district.

“You need functional equality,” said Principal Mike Williams, who has led the school since its inaugural year. “It doesn’t mean everything is going to be the same, but it means we can function on an equal basis with Wylie High or Rockwall High down the road or one of the McKinney or Frisco schools we might compete against. Now, I think we’re pretty close to that point.”

The addition also means the school will be the center in the district for upper-level health science and Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics classes, Williams said.

Originally a ninth-grade campus for Wylie High School, the school wasn’t built to accommodate all four grades initially, Williams said, but rather was constructed to hold 1,400 to 1,600 students.

But as the city’s population boomed, so did the school, growing its student count from 800 in 2007 to about 1,750 this year, Williams said.

And for the last four years, the school has battled growing pains.

The football team dressed in an old P.E. locker room that measured 25 feet long and five feet wide. The two shower heads and cramped space forced the team to change in shifts of eight.

The auditorium’s stage was lined with desks, tables and chairs for theater classes because there weren’t enough rooms.

Woodshop students built a shed to store their supplies. There was no metal shop or welding lab.

And the band schedule was staggered to meet every period because the room couldn’t hold all 155 students and their instruments at once.

“Now, I feel like a college kid who just moved into his first house,” band director Glenn Lambert said. The approximately 9,000-square-foot band hall also includes practice wings and additional rooms to store music, equipment and uniforms.

Previously, Lambert said, the band booster club had off-site storage and the uniform racks were crammed into a dressing room next to the stage.

Though the outside façade was complete when the high school opened, the inside was not. The second floor on the south side was unfinished, and only one hallway on the bottom floor was finished, Williams said.

“You’d open these doors and there would be nothing,” said Ian Halperin, director of communications for Wylie ISD.

He poked his head in a couple of new classrooms on the south side’s second floor.

“This was just open space. It was just wood. It was plywood. This tile wasn’t here yet,” he said, looking down at the floor. “They had to come in and put in the studs, sheetrock, everything.”

Since 2008, the district tried to pass a bond initiative to improve and expand the school.

It failed until 2012 when it passed a more than $21 million bond by 74 percent.

The News reported the initial proposal in 2008 tallied $98.3 million for a mix of projects at Wylie East and other schools.

“You can’t dwell on those things. You can only control what you can control,” Williams said of past bond elections. “The only thing we could control was our kids, how we educated them, how they performed and how they acted.”

Theater director Andrea Farnham said the staff and students at the school have paid their dues. She said her class often would be moved to a hallway or outside if the stage was in use.

“Now, I get my first office,” Farnham said of the space adjacent to the new black box theater, formerly the old band hall.

Down the hallway, a metronome taps away as the drumline rehearses in a practice room.

And for now, the only reminder of the school’s cramped days is the football team’s emblem painted on the entry wall of that P.E. dressing room.

“People see Wylie East as our own identity now,” Williams said. “They see us as something that’s not just going to be here for one day or one year. It’s here and it’s not going away.”

Plano/Murphy/Wylie editor Nanette Light can be reached at 214-977-8039.

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